Benjamin Meed, 88, Dies; Was a Key Advocate for Holocaust Survivors

By MARGALIT FOX

Published: October 26, 2006

Benjamin Meed, a leading advocate for Jewish Holocaust survivors who in the decades after the war gathered them together by the tens of thousands, reuniting people with friends, neighbors and family members presumed to have been lost forever, died on Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.

The cause was pneumonia after a long illness, his son, Steven, said.

A survivor of the Warsaw ghetto, Mr. Meed was at his death the president of the American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, an organization he helped found in 1981. For decades, he was a driving force behind the large-scale reunions of survivors held every few years in Washington.

''Benjamin Meed was the chief organizer and, in the best sense of the term, ward leader of the survivors,'' Michael Berenbaum, a Holocaust scholar and the former project director of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, said in a telephone interview yesterday. ''He was the one survivor who really had a constituency and could produce thousands, and tens of thousands, of survivors to events, to meetings, to gatherings, to reunions.''

Mr. Meed also helped establish two major Holocaust museums in this country, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which opened in Washington in 1993; and the Museum of Jewish Heritage -- A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, which opened in New York 1997.

In 1981, Mr. Meed helped found what became the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, a searchable database now containing more than 185,000 records. Since 1993, the registry has been housed at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington; it is also available at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.

Hundreds of people were reunited by the registry, Mr. Berenbaum said, among them a husband and wife; each had long thought the other dead.

A member for many years of the President's Commission on the Holocaust, Mr. Meed also helped make Holocaust remembrance an annual event in Washington and New York.

Mr. Meed was born Benjamin Miedzyrzecki in Warsaw on Feb. 19, 1918, one of four children of a religious Jewish family. The Germans invaded Poland in 1939, establishing the Warsaw ghetto the next year. With the rest of the city's Jews, Mr. Miedzyrzecki and his family were confined there.

Allowed outside the ghetto walls each day for forced labor, Mr. Miedzyrzecki eventually escaped. He managed to smuggle out his parents and youngest sister. Another sister and a brother were transported to Treblinka, where they died.

In the months leading up to the Warsaw ghetto uprising of 1943, Mr. Miedzyrzecki joined the underground. Passing as a gentile, he lived covertly outside the ghetto under the name Czeslaw Pankiewicz.

Among those he was able to bring out of the ghetto was his future wife, Vladka Peltel, also a member of the underground. During the uprising, they helped rescue some of the Jews fighting inside by smuggling them out through the sewers.

Mr. Meed, who Americanized his name after coming to the United States, arrived here with his wife in 1946. He had about $8 in his pocket. He eventually built a successful import-export business before devoting himself to Holocaust remembrance full time.

For decades after the war ended, many Holocaust survivors were isolated. Their histories eradicated, few felt they belonged to a community of any sort. In 1981, Mr. Meed and others convened the World Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, the first assembly of its kind. Held in Israel, the gathering attracted more than 10,000 survivors. Two years later, the first American survivors' gathering was held in Washington, with 20,000 people in attendance.

Mr. and Mrs. Meed also helped found the Warsaw Ghetto Resistance Organization, begun in 1966. In recent years, they organized and led seminars about the Holocaust and the resistance for high school teachers from around the United States.

Besides his wife, Vladka, and son, Steven, both of Manhattan, Mr. Meed is survived by a daughter, Anna, of Paradise Valley, Ariz.; a sister, Genia Reznic, of Tel Aviv; and five grandchildren.

Among his other work for the Holocaust Memorial Museum, Mr. Meed helped determine the content of the museum's permanent exhibition. It was vital, he often said, that the soul of a Holocaust museum be informed by the experiences of Holocaust survivors.

''If the war had lasted another six months, there would be no survivors,'' Mr. Meed told The Washington Post in 1993. ''And without them, this museum wouldn't have been built.''

Photo: Benjamin Meed in 1986. (Photo by William E. Sauro for The New York Times)